One of the central tenants of Marxism is the workers controlling the means of productions, usually through the mechanism of the state. Say what you will about North American liberals, but very few of them have ever actually advocated that. But the very same people who get enraged when they're compared to Hitler cheerfully associate their political opponents to Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh. I'm not aware of Barack Obama ever saying that he wants to collectivize farming, although both parties have essentially done that through price supports and subsidies for some 70 years now.
That being the case, you can automatically dismiss Fox News, the Sun News Network and roughly three-quarters of Republican and Conservative Party blogs as ignorant, dishonest or both. All you need do to understand the fallacy of their argument is look back to 2003 when the Republican Congress passed - and President Bush the Younger signed - Medicare Part D. They gave boner pills to grandpa and still managed to turn that into a welfare program for the pharmaceutical industry. That, my friends, takes talent.
It doesn't end there, either. "Limited government conservatives" also doubled the size of the Department of Education, which their own party platform once regularly called for the abolishment of; fought two Asian ground wars off the books; passed enormous tax cuts without cutting any spending whatsoever and enacted into law monstrous highway and farm bills. All told, the GOP of 2001-'07 spent trillions of dollars that the country didn't have.
The Bush programs are the biggest drivers of the deficit even today. The tax cuts alone cost close to $4 trillion every decade that they remain in place. Medicare D costs about $700 billion, which will only increase as more seniors become eligible.
And Mitt Romney's newly minted running mate, Paul Ryan voted for it all. He says that he was "miserable" during the time of Dennis Hastert's wild-spending speakership, but he went on to vote for the 2008 Bush stimulus, TARP and the $14 billion Bush bailout of GM and Chrysler (full disclosure: I supported the last two and still do.)
No one forced Representative Ryan to do any of this. He was independently elected and never faced a close race in his district. He very well could have stood on principle. He just didn't want to. Throughout his seven terms in Congress, Ryan has been to balanced budgets what Genghis Khan was to being a "people person."
His various plans are living testaments to ideological wishful thinking, each and every one of them.
Let's start with his 2005 plan to partially privatize Social Security, shall we?
The version of the plan that Bush introduced would have cost a trillion dollars over a decade to implement, none of which was paid for in any way. Ryan's original proposal would have cost twice that, again with no financing included.
Coming as it did so soon after the Enron-Arthur Andersen scandal, the GOP was very careful to always point out that retirement funds would only go into "government-approved stocks," which is the very definition of "picking winners and losers in the market." But that's apparently okay when Republicans do it.
Then there's the moral hazard involved. Most of the GOP can't stop screaming about TARP, but that bailout program would be dwarfed by the bailouts necessitated by a market crash with trillions of dollars of Social Security money involved. Because the stocks involved would be "government approved" the government would have an obligation to maintain their solvency. You'd suddenly have dozens (or hundreds, or thousands) of companies that essentially operate under the same guarantees that Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac used to.
What would happen to the companies whose stocks weren't "government approved?" I'm not guessing that it would be something good.
Oh, and as we learned in the aftermath of the 2008 financial panic (and as the great Screed of Momus points out), the markets are driven almost entirely by fraud, which the Republican party is adamantly against doing anything about.
Let's move on to Ryan's Medicare proposals.
Originally, the program was to be turned into a voucher program of about $2,500. This is silly for a number of reasons.
Firstly, I'm not aware of a single comprehensive insurance plan for young, healthy people that costs as little as that. From what I understand, they average between seven and thirteen grand. Nor is there any indication that these vouchers would be indexed to the explosive inflation of the health care market.
Second, no insurance company in their right mind would sell coverage to seniors, who are usually riddled with preexisting conditions and as a risk group are only slightly behind suicide bombers. Furthermore, your average senior would hit the coverage cap in his or her plan in about 20 minutes.
The only way that you could make sense this fantasy from a business perspective is to incorporate most of the elements of ObamaCare, including the individual mandate, into it and Ryan seems to be against doing that. The United States might as well just include the cost controls from Logan's Run. They're actually more practical than anything Paul Ryan has proposed.
Third, no one over the age of 55 at the time of passage would be impacted. This means that you'd be running the current system for tens of millions of current and incoming seniors with less revenue while also implementing the massively expensive transition. In the short to medium term, the Ryan plan is even more expensive than doing nothing at a time when the country can least afford it.
Paul Ryan's ideas about the tax system are even more stupendously fantastic, relying more on faith than on logic and experience.
The idea of lowering rates and paying for it by closing loopholes and eliminating deductions is actually a good one. What sets off alarm bells in my head is that neither Romney or Ryan will tell you which loopholes they'll close or deductions they'll eliminate. Ryan laughably dodged the question by saying "I'm not on the Ways and Means Committee."
That answer should automatically disqualify him from being taken seriously because it makes his program impossible to score. You don't know what it will cost or if it balances because you're left to guess what half of it actually is.
You should then assume that no loopholes will be closed or deductions eliminated. And you can also be assured that that won't stop anyone from passing the proposed tax cuts anyway. As Jay Batman at Screed of Momus says, tax cuts always pass. Spending cuts and structural reforms to the code almost never do, especially by themselves.
If I know Republicans half as well as I think I do, I can almost guarantee you that they'll pass the tax cuts first, with their solemn word that they'll do everything else "later," which means "when we're finally broke and the international bond market makes us." So, on top of the existing Bush tax cuts, you'll get another round of cuts that are at least as large (and probably larger because of a 10% cut at the top rate) costing a total of at least $9 trillion over the next ten years when combined with the 2001-'03 cuts. They're promising that they'll eat their asparagus for dessert if only they can have their cotton candy for dinner.
Finally, both the Romney and Ryan plans both assume GDP growth of 4%, this despite the fact that the average rate of growth since the end of World War II has only been 3.2%. Despite his gigantic tax cuts, the economy only averaged 2.09% growth under George W. Bush. Neither candidate provides any evidence that they'll achieve this rate of growth. You just have to take their word for it. But we know that both Romney and Ryan's plans (and especially Ryan's) cause the deficit to skyrocket in the short term.
That raises an interesting question. If the Republicans control both houses of Congress after November, will they continue raising the debt ceiling again and again for President Romney and Vice President Ryan?
There are a lot of ways that you could describe these two, but no serious person would use terms like "fiscally conservative" to do it. If anything, they're worse than the statist liberals because they bankrupt the country faster.
There's a well-known way to contain entitlements, but no one in the United States is serious about doing it. First, you immediately raise the retirement age for everyone under, say, sixty. Then you scale benefits to average income earned during the last ten or twenty years. Getting rid of the payroll tax cap is also a pretty good idea because you'll need the revenue. Once that's done, you means-test the entire mess so that no one who retires with a net worth of more than, say, two million dollars collects benefits at all.
That way you can cover the people who actually need the programs while people more serious than Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan figure out a way to gradually phase the entire blight out of existence. If we've learned anything about government involvement in retirement planning and providing health care, it's that they've made them unbelievably expensive. But it will (and should) take several decades to phase out the government role in them.
If you're an American that actually cares about these kind of things, I don't know what to tell you other than that you should seriously consider voting for Gary Johnson. He's the one candidate for the presidency this year (and, in actual fact, in the last fifteen years) who actually has balanced a budget.
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